WHEN my National Lottery numbers finally come up, I’ll have two cars parked in MY driveway (my wife will have her own driveway!), and this is one of them. And I’ll have it in this colour too. This is the retro muscle car I have dreamed about. I’m not really a car-nut but this is simply stunning!!

I love this picture. While it’s not me OR a train from the Ulster Folk & Transport Museum, it reminds me of trips to the museum, both when it was based in Dee St, in East Belfast and later at it’s current home in Cultra. The trips with my Dad were to Dee St and he would lift me up onto the locomotives and trams (he couldn’t do it now!). The smell of the old leather in the trams and cars, and oil from the locomotives, even now, are very evocative of an earlier age, both, of the late Sixties and of course, from whenever the various means of transport were in use. I brought all of my kids there, at various stages. Chris was an easy sell as he was a Thomas The Tank Engine fan, but the girls…not so much!

It’s also fairly sad when some of the vehicles currently in the museum are those that I can remember driving around Belfast!

Google are hosting LIFE magazine’s photographic archive on their servers. Among many other great photographs are 200 of Marilyn Monroe at various stages of her career. If I’m honest, I could look at her photos all day long. Not sure exactly what it is, but her mysterious allure is incredible – gorgeous!

Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians in Gaza will have obvious consequences, not least an increase in recruitment among groups who want to avenge the slaughter of their families and friends. They will graduate quickly from slingshots to suicide belts through frustration and desperation. Israel is stoking up trouble for generations to come…

This is the picture I should have used with yesterday’s post. Israel’s hypocrisy around their treatment of Palestinians and that of the Jews by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s is obvious without pictures – why can’t the governments of the Western World see it and do something about it?

The blockade of Gaza goes on while Israel continues it’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people. One thing I’ll never understand is how Israel can treat other human beings in this way while simultaneously claiming the moral high ground. Evidence of the horrific treatment of Jews before and during the Holocaust is everywhere, and the world, rightly, should not be allowed to forget what happened to them. We see plenty of films, plays, books, art works, etc. to remind us of what happened.

However, when such horrendous treatment of men, women and children is meted out by an all powerful occupational army backed by the world’s greatest superpower and ignored by the rest of the world’s governments, any Israeli “moral credit” loses it’s value very quickly.

I’m just back from watching W., Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic. Richard Dreyfuss was right – Stone’s film was far too empathetic! Entertaining, but unfortunately not fictional. The most accurate and CHILLING performance was RD’s portrayal of Cheney – he came across as the scary Bond villain – very true to life!

I thought at two hours long it would have covered much more in terms of the Bush connections with the Saudis and the whole 9/11 thing, for example – too much time spent on his drunken youth.